Last week while I was at WebManiacs I decided I wanted to go with a different theme for my blog. The GlossyBlue one was nice, but a lot of people are using it and I wanted to be a bit more unique. I searched around and found a couple free WordPress themes and decided to port one over. I must say skinning Mango is not as easy as I would like, but it isnt rocket science either. I created a new skin in about 3 days, working via the plane, hotel room at night and this morning. I am not a CSS wizard so it could probably be done a lot faster if I had some more skillz. I plan on skinning a couple more themes, which I will share. This one however "BlueMoon" wont be shared until I decide to switch to a different one (sorry).

Read more...

I created a new custom tag called "ShoppingAds".  I am not a fan of using custom tags in Mango, I prefer the plugins.  Why? Well with the custom tags you have to insert them into your skin templates and I honestly dont like doing that.  What if the skin template gets updated?  It becomes a pain to maintain/manage.  For now creating custom tags to handle Ads and such seems to be easier though so thats what I used. 

I am not sure if I am a fan of ShoppingAds, the javascript seems to slow down my page loads, but that may be because I went a little overboard on how many I am displaying (I need to fix that). 

Below is a couple things you want to do before implementing the tag on your mango powered blog site:

Read more...

I created a new Mango plugin, now you can add blip.tv videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [bliptv:postId]. All you need to do is pass in the post ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting. 

It is pretty basic right now.  I ping blip.tv''s API, pass them the post_ID and do some xmlParse/xmlSearch stuff and it returns the embed code.  The plugin just outputs that and displays it in your blog.  Like I said very simple and basic, I haven't figured out how to modify how the player gets displayed, such as height, width, options the player has on it, etc.... feel free to improve upon it :) You can thank my dog for waking me up at 6am on a Saturday morning for getting this done.

You can download the source here.
Just drop the bliptv folder in your "components/plugins/user" directory and it will display in your Mango Admin under Add-ons than all you need to do is activate it.

I got the idea after seeing a Thermo Video on Ryan Stewarts blog and figured what the heck, if WordPress can do it Mango can!!

Apart from pay per click, the other most preferred way of online marketing is going for email marketing. Of course this means reliable web hosting is necessary.

I created a new mango plugin for the brightcove player, now you can add brightcove videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [brightcove:videoid]. All you need to do is pass in the video ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting.  I was inspired to create this plugin by Seb Duggan, who created the YouTube Plugin for Mango recently.  Like him, this was my first Mango plugin.  I plan on adding width, height and maybe some other useful features to the plugin soon.

You can download the source here. Read on to see the plugin in action!

Read more...

I have been using Mango blog now for about 3 months on this site and I have been using it on a internal company site for a little over a year.  Mango blog is continuing to blossom into a great coldfusion blog engine that is extremely easy to skin, Laura at AsFusion is doing a great job! 

Recently I wanted to add ads to my blog to try and monitize it a little bit (aka extra cash).  I originally thought about adding a plugin to Mango blog’s admin section, but realized one I don’t have a great understanding of the framework and two I wanted a quick way to add Google AdSense and Amazon Adsto my site. 

The second option relates directly to you know what, faster time to market – exactly!  So once I implemented both ad options using the standard copy/paste procedure and adding more junk in my mango skin I decided that I wanted to make it more reusable and clean it up a little.  You never know, the code could indeed become handy in the near future and honestly I like to keep things nice a neat.

So instead of going the plugin route I decided on a easier approach, I created four custom tags each one handles a piece of the ads on this blog:

• AdSense.cfm
• AdSearch.cfm
• AmazonDeals.cfm (In-Work)
• AmazonOmakase.cfm
  

Read more...